What Mama Taught Me: The Seven Core Values of Life by Tony Brown

Tony - where's your editorial staff when you need them?

Published in 2003 by William Morrow

Honestly, I like Tony Brown. I enjoyed his PBS show. I used to listen to him on the radio when I could on WLS in Chicago. But, his books are not nearly as good as I know they can be!

What Mama Taught Me: The Seven Core Values of Life deals with his "Mama", a woman who took him in when he was a baby and his mother was neglecting him. She was not a blood relative, just a woman who saw a baby starving to death due to neglect. He lived with her until her death when he was 12. This book is an attempt on his part to honor her and the simple wisdom she taught him.

The Seven Core Values are:

1. Reality: The Value of Being Yourself.

2. Knowledge: The Value of understanding your purpose

3. Race: The Value of honoring your humanity (In this case, the only race his Mama was worried about was worried about was the human race)

4. History: The value of investing in the future

5. Truth: the value of being true to yourself

6. Patience: the value of "Keeping the faith"

7. Love: the value of living joyfully.

Tony Brown

As in his other book, Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown, Brown repeats himself a lot. He quotes a passage from Hamlet 3 times (part of the "to thine ownself be true" speech) as part of his multiple descriptions of his high school English teacher. He lifts two pages from his other book concerning a story about a YMCA opening in his hometown. He says the same thing, over and over, repetitively, a lot. He repeats himself. Yes, indeed, he seems to say something and then say it again. Repetitive, he is.

Like his last book ('Black Lies, White Lies), this book is in serious need of an editor. He seems to have written the chapters separately, without regard to what he had previously written. I like the sentiments and ideas expressed, but, man, it was sometimes tiring to read them.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: What Mama Taught Me: The Seven Core Values of Life

Reviewed in February of 2005.

Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown by Tony Brown

This book is up and down with an absolutely bizarre middle.

Originally published in 1995.

As you may know, I have taught for multiple years in urban schools. The issue of race in America has come up daily, and some days it is an ever-present feature. I am forced to think about it all of the time in the classroom and all I know is that I don't know enough to solve the issues and no one ever will. 

Tony Brown is a Black man (he prefers that term) who has hosted a PBS discussion show called "Tony Brown's Journal" for years. He also hosts a Saturday talk show on WLS 890 AM out of Chicago that can be heard throughout the Midwest thanks to their high wattage broadcast strength.

He is an interesting man and a good discussion leader on his shows. His views were fairly consistent with my own, although I think that his perceptions of white america are a little off, just as he would undoubtedly think that my views of black America are off. The first 1/3 and the last 1/3 of Black Lies, White Lies are full of pretty good thoughts, observations and ideas, except for their repetitiveness.

The middle 1/3 is a bit bizarre. It concerns AIDS and his denial that it even exists. He claims that AIDS is not real because there are 30+ diseases that are associated with it. He wonders how certain types of cancers and certain types of fungal infections and viruses can all be from the same disease. He misunderstands that these diseases are presumed to be symptoms of AIDS since they are rare and usually are only present to people with depressed immune systems - which happens to people with AIDS (thus its name). He also touts a theory that claims that AIDS was started accidentally by using viruses from Monkeys to create a Smallpox vaccine that was used in Africa in the 1970s. After doing a Google search I can tell you that he is not alone with this belief, but most others who share it assume that it was a racist plot by the US government in an effort to control population.

I was disappointed by "Black Lies, White Lies" because I like Brown's TV and radio shows - they seem to be full of commonsense discussion and straight talk, not conspiracy theories. I give this book '2 stars' for its repetitive nature and the bizarre middle of the book.

As an addendum, I thought I would add these conclusions that were gleaned from a poll and interviews by the "Washington Post" of black students and their beliefs concerning education that Brown quoted in the book. I thought the poll pretty much encapsulated the attitudes of black students (as a whole) that I had in the Indianapolis Public Schools:

*Black students are poor and stay poor because they are dumber than Whites.
*Black kids who do their homework and behave must want to be white. White kids who do poorly or dress cool want to be Black.
*Black people don't want to work hard.
*Blacks don't need to work hard because it won't matter in the end.
*Blacks have to be bad so they can fight and defend themselves from other Blacks.
*Blacks see their badness as natural.
*Black men make women pregnant and leave.
*Black boys expect to die unnaturally.
*White people are smart and have money.

In my experience, the poll-takers nailed these attitudes from black students about black people dead on. Not all of my students have expressed these attitudes, but a significant percentage have.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Black Lies, White Lies

I rate this book 2 out of 5 stars.

Reviewed on August 13, 2004.